Over Eight Years, President Barack Obama Has Created the Most Intrusive Surveillance Apparatus in the World. To What End?

Demonstrators wearing cardboard surveillance camera hats carry a sign depicting
U.S. President Barack Obama at the 'Stop Watching Us: A Rally Against Mass
Surveillance' march in Washington, October 26, 2013. (photo: Jonathan
Ernst/Reuters)

Over
Eight Years, President Barack Obama Has Created the Most Intrusive Surveillance
Apparatus in the World. To What End?

By James Bamford, Foreign
Policy

25 September 16

Over eight years, President Barack Obama has created the most
intrusive surveillance apparatus in the world. To what end?

This
summer, at 1:51 p.m. on Saturday, June 11, an unearthly roar shattered the
afternoon quiet along the Florida coast. On Cape Canaveral, liquid fuel surged
through the thick aluminum veins of a Delta IV Heavy rocket nearly as tall as
the U.S. Capitol. Two million pounds of thrust in three symmetrical boosters
fired the engines, sending the craft hurtling over the Atlantic Ocean into the
heavens. Eighty seconds after takeoff, it hit Mach 1, the speed of sound.

The
Delta IV Heavy, introduced in 2004, is America’s most powerful rocket, and this
was only the ninth time it had launched. Even more exclusive, however, was its
top-secret cargo: Inside its nearly seven-story-high nose cone was an Advanced
Orion, the world’s largest satellite. About eight hours after launch, when the
most advanced spy craft ever built went into geosynchronous orbit, it unfurled
its gigantic mesh antenna, larger than a football field, and began
eavesdropping on the Earth below.

The
mission’s patch, dubbed “epic/terrifying” by the Verge, depicted a masked,
armored knight standing defensively before an American flag. A sword strapped
to his back bore a cross-guard resembling a set of claws. According to the
National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), the intelligence agency responsible for
the satellite, the image delivered “a message of tenacious, fierce focus …
representing extreme reach with global coverage.”

In a
sense, this was a fitting tribute to President Barack Obama as his
administration entered its last six months in the White House. Over his two
terms, Obama has created the most powerful surveillance state the world has
ever seen. Although other leaders may have created more oppressive spying
regimes, none has come close to constructing one of equivalent size, breadth,
cost, and intrusiveness. From 22,300 miles in space, where seven Advanced Orion
crafts now orbit; to a 1-million-square-foot building in the Utah desert that
stores data intercepted from personal phones, emails, and social media accounts;
to taps along the millions of miles of undersea cables that encircle the Earth
like yarn, U.S. surveillance has expanded exponentially since Obama’s
inauguration on Jan. 20, 2009.

The
effort to wire the world — or to achieve “extreme reach,” in the NRO’s parlance
— has cost American taxpayers more than $100 billion. Obama has justified the
gargantuan expense by arguing that “there are some trade-offs involved” in
keeping the country safe. “I think it’s important to recognize that you can’t
have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero
inconvenience,” he said in June 2013, shortly after Edward Snowden, a former
contractor with the National Security Agency (NSA), revealed widespread
government spying on Americans’ phone calls.

Since
Snowden’s leaks, pundits and experts (myself included) have debated the
legality and ethics of the U.S. surveillance apparatus. Yet has the president’s
blueprint for spying succeeded on its own terms? An examination of the
unprecedented architecture reveals that the Obama administration may only have
drowned itself in data. What’s more, in trying to right the ship, America’s
intelligence culture has grown frenzied. Agencies are ever seeking to get
bigger, move faster, and pry deeper to keep pace with the enormous quantity of
information being generated the world over and with the new tactics and
technologies intended to shield it from spies.

This
race is a defining feature of Obama’s legacy — and one that threatens to become
never-ending, even after he’s left the White House.

The
foundations of Obama’s shadow state date back to the immediate post-9/11
period. Six weeks after the attacks, the Patriot Act, which greatly expanded
the government’s surveillance powers, was rushed through Congress and signed by
President George W. Bush. A few months later, the Bush administration created
the Information Awareness Office, part of the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency (DARPA). That led to the development of the Total Information
Awareness program, designed to vacuum up vast amounts of private electronic
data — banking transactions, travel documents, medical files, and more — from
citizens. After the media exposed and criticized the program, which didn’t use
warrants, Congress shut it down in late 2003. Much of the operation, though,
was simply transferred to the NSA.

In
2005, the New York Times revealed that Bush had authorized the NSA to monitor
the international electronic communications “of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of
people in the United States.” Code-named Stellar Wind, the program intercepted
telephone conversations, emails, and metadata from taps inside AT&T
facilities and from satellites. Each day, millions of communications were
scanned for addresses and keywords associated with al Qaeda. Any leads were
sent to the FBI. (A secret internal analysis conducted by the bureau in 2006
indicated that no information from Stellar Wind had proved useful.)

The
same week the Times investigation was published, Obama, then a senator, gave a
speech defending civil liberties and asking the Senate to hold off on voting to
reauthorize the Patriot Act. “If someone wants to know why their own government
has decided to go on a fishing expedition through every personal record or
private document … this legislation gives people no rights to appeal the need
for such a search in a court of law,” the former constitutional law professor
declared. “This is just plain wrong.”

Obama
rode a wave of negative public opinion on mass surveillance. In January 2006, a
Zogby Analytics poll showed that, by a margin of 52 to 43 percent, Americans
wanted Congress to consider impeaching Bush if he wiretapped citizens without a
judge’s approval. Obama then carried the opposition narrative into his White
House bid. In late 2007, he publicly promised, “No more secrecy. That’s a
commitment that I make to you as president…. That means no more illegal
wiretapping of American citizens.” He even vowed to support a filibuster of any
bill that gave retroactive immunity to companies providing assistance to
government spies. (PRISM, a secretive program to gather data from major
internet companies that was later revealed in Snowden’s leaks, was launched in
2007.)

Yet as
his campaign progressed, Obama’s stance hardened. Overseas, scores of people
were being killed in Iraq by suicide bombings; at home, opponents were
hammering Obama for being weak on terrorism. Amid this shifting political
climate, he brought in John Brennan, a former CIA deputy director, as his top
intelligence advisor. During the Bush years, Brennan had supported the very
policies Obama campaigned against. Within months, his influence on the
candidate was evident. In July 2008, Obama reversed his earlier promises,
announcing support for a sweeping surveillance law that largely legalized the
NSA’s warrantless eavesdropping program and granted immunity to telecom
companies that aided in spying.

Many
of Obama’s supporters were horrified. “I am disgusted,” one wrote on the
candidate’s website. “Obama will NOT receive my vote in November.” But the
Democratic nominee justified his switch by pointing to violent threats in
places such as Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. “In a dangerous world,” he
wrote on a campaign blog, “government must have the authority to collect the
intelligence we need to protect the American people.” From a pragmatic
perspective, Obama was also heading into the last push for the presidency and
needed to appeal to the broader electorate, which viewed terrorism as a bigger
threat than his liberal base did.

After
being elected, Obama staffed up with intelligence officials who supported mass
surveillance. Brennan became his chief counterterrorism advisor (and, a few
years later, director of the CIA). Maureen Baginski, the NSA’s former director
of signals intelligence, a job that had placed her in charge of wiretapping,
joined the transition team that helped establish policy for the NSA and other
spy agencies.

Most
notable, though, was Obama’s decision to keep the NSA’s chief in place. Keith
Alexander, a three-star general who’d led the agency since 2005, was a force to
be reckoned with. “We jokingly referred to him as Emperor Alexander — with good
cause, because whatever Keith wants, Keith gets,” a former senior CIA official
told me. “We would sit back literally in awe of what he was able to get from
Congress, from the White House, and at the expense of everybody else.”
Alexander’s preferred spying method was blunt. According to a document leaked
by Snowden, while visiting Menwith Hill station, the NSA’s giant listening post
in England, in June 2008, Alexander asked, “Why can’t we collect all the
signals all the time?” He applied this approach in Iraq, pulling intelligence
from phone interceptions, planes, drones, satellites, and other sensors into a
powerful computer analysis system known as the Real Time Regional Gateway. He
also ran the NSA’s massive metadata surveillance program, which involved
secretly keeping track of every phone in the United States: what numbers were
called, from where, and exactly when — billions of communications each year.

One of
the few people with the security clearance to witness Alexander in action was
Judge Reggie Walton of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). He
didn’t like what he saw, particularly that the NSA did not have “reasonable and
articulable suspicion” to justify monitoring some 90 percent of targets in its
metadata program. In a January 2009 opinion, Walton wrote that he was
“exceptionally concerned” that the agency was operating in “flagrant violation”
of the FISC’s orders regarding privacy. Two months later, he accused the NSA of
making “material misrepresentations” to the court, which in less polite
language is known as lying. He pointed the finger at Alexander, writing that
the general’s explanation for why his agency had been eavesdropping illegally
on tens of thousands of Americans — essentially, that he thought privacy
restrictions applied only to certain archived data — “strains credulity.”
Walton concluded that oversight of metadata gathering “has never functioned effectively.”

Yet
Obama didn’t dismiss Alexander. In fact, the following year, the general was
awarded a fourth star and tapped to lead the newly minted, top-secret U.S.
Cyber Command. And rather than limit the NSA chief’s collect-it-all regime, the
president authorized its expansion.

For
the Obama administration, the next frontier in spying was being able to
eavesdrop on every single person in a country by obtaining “full-take audio” of
all cell-phone conversations. For this new program, code-named SOMALGET, it
needed a testing ground. The Bahamas — small, contained, peaceful, 50 miles
from the Florida coast — fit the bill.

In
2009, not long after Obama had taken office, the NSA gained access to Bahamian
communications networks by subterfuge. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration
got legal permission to plant monitoring equipment in the nation’s telecom
systems by convincing the islands’ government that the operation would help
catch drug dealers. Really, though, it opened a backdoor for the NSA so that it
could tap, record, and store cellular data. “[O]ur covert mission is the
provision of SIGINT [signals intelligence],” a document leaked by Snowden
stated. The host country was “not aware.”

Within
two years, SOMALGET would achieve its goal of 100 percent surveillance in the
Bahamas — all without legal warrants. This included spying on the cell phones
of some 6 million U.S. citizens who visit or reside in the country each year;
notable celebrities with homes there are Bill Gates, John Travolta, and Tiger Woods.

The
NSA didn’t stop with the Bahamas, however. It eventually deployed SOMALGET in
Afghanistan, which brought the total number of conversations recorded and
stored by the program to “over 100 million call events per day,” according to
leaked agency files. It also began collecting metadata from phones in the
Philippines, Mexico, and Kenya. NSA planning documents in 2013 anticipated
further uses in other countries.

In
some cases, the Obama administration cooperated with foreign governments to
expand its reconnaissance capabilities. This included members of the Five Eyes,
a clandestine alliance of intelligence agencies in the United States, the
United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand that dates back to the Cold
War. During Obama’s first three years in office, the U.S. government paid the
British equivalent of the NSA, the Government Communications Headquarters
(GCHQ), at least $150 million to enhance surveillance. Because undersea
fiber-optic cables from North and South America transit the United Kingdom on
their way to Europe and the Middle East, the GCHQ was in an ideal position to
place taps on them. It did just that, on cables that could transfer upwards of
21 petabytes of information daily; this included a large slice of the internet,
which could be stored for three days before being replaced by new data, and
some 600 million “telephone events” every 24 hours. In 2010, not long after
becoming operational, the program grew to be so successful that the GCHQ
boasted it had the “biggest internet access” of any Five Eyes member. “This is
a massive amount of data!” acknowledged an agency PowerPoint later made public
by Snowden. Another leaked document declared,

“We are in the golden age.”

To
sift through everything, 250 NSA analysts joined forces with about 300 from the
GCHQ. Using computer systems, they searched for data containing any of 71,000
“selectors,” such as keywords, email addresses, or phone numbers. Internally,
this work was dubbed Mastering of The Internet (MTI). A leaked 2010 GCHQ document
stated, “MTI delivered the next big step in the access, processing and storage
journey.” In a single day, the file continued, a GCHQ surveillance operation
known as Tempora had captured, stored, and analyzed some 39 billion pieces of
information.

The
acceleration of surveillance required a construction boom of a scale
unprecedented in the history of U.S. intelligence. On March 5, 2012, Alexander
opened what is likely the world’s largest listening post, about 130 miles north
of Savannah, Georgia; members of the press were warned not to bring cameras
within two miles. The $286 million, 604,000-square-foot facility has more than
2,500 workstations and 47 conference rooms, and it employs more than 4,000
eavesdroppers and other personnel who focus on the Middle East. Earphones on,
facing their computers, employees sit in cubicles and listen to “cuts,” or
intercepted conversations. “It’s very near real time,” Adrienne Kinne, a former
intercept operator at the complex, told me a few years ago. “We would just get these
thousands of cuts dumped on us … [from] Iraq, Afghanistan, and a whole swath of
area. We would get [calls in] Tajik, Uzbek, Russian, Chinese.”

As of
2013, the NSA had spent upwards of $300 million to expand a former Sony
chip-fabrication plant near San Antonio and turn it into the agency’s principal
listening post for the Caribbean and Central and South America. About 900 miles
northwest, it was also constructing a new operations building at Buckley Air
Force Base near Denver. The mission was to collect intercepted communications
from spy satellites, including Advanced Orions, and ground stations like
Menwith Hill, then transmit the data through fiber-optic cables to analysts at
their desks near Savannah, San Antonio, and at other NSA outposts. Meanwhile,
in January 2012, the NSA opened a $358 million listening post on the island of
Oahu targeting Asian and Pacific countries. Upon its debut, Alexander said in a
news release that the facility’s goal “is to produce foreign signals
intelligence for decision-makers as global terrorism now jeopardizes the lives
of our citizens, military forces, and international allies.”

Not to
be left out, Menwith Hill also underwent a multimillion-dollar expansion. Like
a moon base hidden in the rolling Yorkshire hills, the station’s 33 giant
golf-ball-like radomes house parabolic antennas capable of 2 million intercepts
an hour from communications satellites. To better analyze data at the post, in
2012, the NSA added powerful supercomputers and boosted personnel from 1,800 to
2,500.

That
November, Obama was re-elected following a campaign that centered almost
exclusively on domestic and economic issues; little attention was paid to
surveillance and privacy. (The Snowden leaks were still more than six months
down the road.) Beyond the campaign trail, however, on high ground in
Bluffdale, Utah, construction was in progress on the pièce de résistance of
Obama’s shadow empire. The $2 billion, 1-million-square-foot complex was set to
function as the centerpiece of the NSA’s global eavesdropping operations. Into
it would flow streams of emails, text messages, tweets, Google searches,
financial records, Facebook posts, YouTube videos, metadata, and telephone
chatter picked up by the constellation of satellites, cable taps, and listening
posts by then in operation.

For
intelligence analysts, the Bluffdale facility serves as a sort of “cloud,” or
external hard drive, for intercepted data. About 200 people tend to some 10,000
racks of humming, blinking servers containing trillions of words and thoughts
sucked up from unsuspecting people. Some areas of the complex contain data
considered critical, such as calls and emails to and from key members of al
Qaeda and the Islamic State; other information is eventually erased to make
room for more on the servers.

Outside
the facility, there’s been the occasional protest. In June 2014, a bulbous,
135-foot-long blimp appeared in the sky bearing a giant sign that read, “NSA
Illegal Spying Below.” Inside were representatives from a coalition of
grassroots groups dedicated to privacy. “We’re flying an airship over the Utah
data center,” a written statement from one participating organization, the
Electronic Frontier Foundation, proclaimed, “which has come to symbolize the
NSA’s collect-it-all approach to surveillance.”

Although
the effort to gather every possible bit of information follows a certain logic
— the more you have, the more likely you are to find what you’re looking for —
it is complicated by what NSA officials refer to as the three V’s. “Inside [the]
NSA, we often say that’s the volume, velocity, variety issue,” Alexander’s
deputy, Chris Inglis, told an audience of intelligence officials in 2010, “an
enormous quantity of information moving ever faster and coming at us in very
complex forms.”

Obama’s
surveillance architecture, it seems, has done little to address this
multifaceted problem. In fact, it may have made it worse. Privacy hasn’t been
traded for security, but for the government hoarding more data than it knows
how to handle. Kinne, the former intercept operator, described her work as
“just like searching blindly through all these cuts to see what the hell was
what.”

In the
wake of the Snowden leaks, administration officials tried hard to justify the
secret collection of Americans’ telephone records. “We know of at least 50
threats that have been averted because of this information,” Obama said during
a visit to Berlin in 2013. He offered no specific examples. Alexander,
meanwhile, claimed numerous times to the media and in public speeches that “54
different terrorist-related activities” had been thwarted. But he, too, offered
no examples.

On
Oct. 2, 2013, when called to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the
general backtracked. Alexander cited only one instance when an intercept
detected a potential threat: a Somali taxi driver living in San Diego who sent
$8,500 to al-Shabab, his home country’s notorious terrorist group. That winter,
a panel set up by Obama to review the NSA’s operations concluded that the
agency had stopped no terrorist attacks. “We found none,” Geoffrey Stone, a
University of Chicago law professor and one of five panel members, bluntly told
NBC News in December 2013. Since then, despite mass surveillance both at home
and abroad, shootings or bombings have occurred in San Bernardino, California;
Orlando, Florida; Paris; Brussels; and Istanbul — to name just a few places.

Beyond
failures to create security, there is the matter of misuse or abuse of U.S.
spying, the effects of which extend well beyond violations of Americans’
constitutional liberties.

In 2014, I met with Snowden in Moscow for a magazine
assignment. Over pizza in a hotel room not far from Red Square, he told me that
the NSA puts innocent people in danger. In his experience, for instance, the
agency routinely had passed raw, unredacted intercepts of millions of phone
calls and emails from Arab- and Palestinian-Americans to its Israeli
counterpart, Unit 8200. Once in Israeli hands, Snowden feared, this information
might be used to extort information or otherwise harm relatives of the
individuals being spied upon.

That
September, after my interview with Snowden was published, 43 members of Unit
8200 quit their posts in moral protest. They charged publicly that Israel used
intercepted communications, like those sent to it by the NSA, to inflict
“political persecution” on Palestinians. They said data were gathered on sexual
orientations, infidelities, money problems, family medical conditions, and
other private matters and then used as tools of coercion — to force targets
into becoming Israeli collaborators, for example. “[T]he intelligence is used
to apply pressure to people, to make them cooperate with Israel,” one member of
the dissenting group, who asked that his name not be used, told the Guardian.

The NSA
has at least considered employing similar tactics in the United States. In a
top-secret memo dated Oct. 3, 2012, Alexander raised the possibility of using
vulnerabilities discovered in mass data — “viewing sexually explicit material
online,” for instance — to damage reputations. The agency could, say, smear
individuals it believed were radicalizing others in an effort to diminish their
influence.

Obama,
meanwhile, has taken virtually no steps to fix what ails his spying apparatus.

After the Snowden revelations, the president called for ending the NSA’s
collection of metadata from phone calls by U.S. citizens. But this represents a
rare tremor in the surveillance state. More consistently, Obama has limited
oversight. In his first year as president, he threatened to veto a bill from
his own party that would have required him to brief all members of
congressional intelligence committees about covert operations, as opposed to
the much smaller “Gang of Eight,” made up of top-ranking party and committee
leaders and created in the Bush era to shield illegal activities from scrutiny.
Gang briefings, former White House counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke told
Rachel Maddow in 2009, were often a “farce.”

While
keeping critics at bay, the Obama administration has gone after people blowing
the whistle on intelligence abuses. The Justice Department has charged eight
leakers — more than double the number under all previous presidents combined.
“[T]his trend line should be going in the opposite direction,” an ACLU lawyer argued
in a 2014 blog post. “The modern national security state is more powerful than
ever — more powerful even than during the Cold War. It demands democratic
accountability.”

The
National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) released a report in June detailing
what it calls a “data tsunami.” By the end of this decade, there will be
anywhere from 50 billion to 200 billion networked devices on a planet of some 8
billion people. “For the intelligence community, this equates to 40 zettabytes
of data, or 1 sextillion bytes,” the NGA states. “Described in more familiar
terms, this is the equivalent of every person on the planet having 174
newspapers delivered daily.” Viewed another way, that’s more data than 7
billion Libraries of Congress could hold.

In the
surveillance state Obama has built, this deluge threatens to bury the few
needles that might exist — warnings of attacks, signals of radicalizing groups,
rallying cries of extremist recruiters — even deeper in the proverbial
haystack. So, too, does encryption: Once a tool used mostly by spy agencies and
militaries, encryption is becoming commonplace in everyday digital chatter to
keep government eyes and ears out. Gmail offers it. WhatsApp began providing
its billion-plus users with automatic encryption in April. In July, Facebook
announced that it would soon give the option of end-to-end encryption on its
Messenger app. More services will surely follow.

Speed
is a critical component in breaking encryption because most codes are based on
factoring extremely large prime numbers. Conducting what’s known as a “brute
force” attack — trying every possible combination of digits — using even the
most powerful computers in operation would take centuries or longer to succeed.

Obama,
though, signed an executive order in July 2015 urging the creation of an
exaflop supercomputer — a machine about 30 times faster than anything in
existence. It would be capable of conducting more than a quintillion
(1,000,000,000,000,000,000) operations per second. The president’s charge to
build was mostly targeted at the scientific community; behind the scenes,
however, the NSA has been preparing to breach the exaflop barrier since 2011.

That
year, the agency secretly built a 260,000-square-foot facility at the Oak Ridge
National Laboratory in Tennessee, the same place where the Manhattan Project
developed the atomic bomb. Its research focuses on hitting the computing speed
that would not only give the agency an edge over encryption, but also provide
it with better cataloging capabilities to tackle the ocean of data already
arriving daily at complexes like the one in Bluffdale, Utah.

The
government is also finding ways to cheat, most notably through Bullrun, a
code-named program run jointly by the NSA and the GCHQ. The agencies
clandestinely collaborate with technology companies and internet service
providers to “insert vulnerabilities into commercial encryption systems,” as
reported by the Guardian. As of 2010, according to a top-secret GCHQ
PowerPoint, the NSA had already achieved a breakthrough: “Vast amounts of
encrypted Internet data which have up till now been discarded are now
exploitable,” the leaked slides state. By 2015, the British agency hoped to
have cracked the encryption of 15 major internet companies.

Looking
further into the future, Obama’s NSA has also explored quantum computing —
technology that, theoretically, could defeat encryption for good. Its science
breaks all the rules. Today, data are stored in binary bits — either ones or
zeros — but in quantum computing, so-called qubits could be both one and zero
at the same time. This would allow for almost incomprehensible operating
speeds. According to documents released by Snowden, the NSA has been working to
build “a cryptologically useful quantum computer” as part of a research program
broadly called Penetrating Hard Targets.

Ultrafast
computing could be a game-changer in U.S. intelligence. It would break the last
line of defense against government intrusion. Though this wouldn’t necessarily
— or even likely — guarantee that security threats could be identified, it
would allow the surveillance state to seize every bit of power that its
backers, including Obama, have sought to give it.

After
the White House panel set up to review NSA surveillance in 2013 suggested
halting efforts to undermine commercial encryption, the president demurred. In
a speech — one of the few he’s given on surveillance in his second term — Obama
kept to the middle of the political road. “We have to make some important
decisions about how to protect ourselves and sustain our leadership in the
world, while upholding the civil liberties and privacy protections that our
ideals and our Constitution require,” he said. “We need to do so not only
because it is right, but because the challenges posed by threats like
terrorism, and proliferation, and cyberattacks are not going away anytime
soon.”

Zack
Whittaker, the security editor for ZDNet, summed up Obama’s remarks in a
headline: “Keep calm and carry on spying.”

Whoever
wins the upcoming presidential election will probably do just that. In response
to the Orlando shooting in June, Hillary Clinton said, “I have proposed an
intelligence surge to bolster our capabilities across the board with
appropriate safeguards here at home” — but offered no details on what that
would entail. She has called for Snowden to return from Russia and face trial,
and while supporting the end of the NSA’s metadata program, she’s suggested
that the agency never broke the law. “I think it’s fair to say the government,
the NSA, didn’t, so far as we know, cross legal lines, but they came right up
and sat on them,” she told an audience at a San Francisco technology summit in
August 2014.

Donald
Trump’s rhetoric, meanwhile, suggests that he would prioritize making America’s
surveillance empire as powerful as possible. “I think security has to preside,
and it has to be preeminent,” he told Fox News in June 2015. Trump has also
said NSA reconnaissance is just a fact of modern American life. “I assume that
when I pick up my telephone, people are listening to my conversations,” he told
radio host Hugh Hewitt last December, implying that Americans should just get
used to being spied on.

Whistleblowers,
it seems, would not fare well under a Trump administration. “If I were
president, [Russian President Vladimir] Putin would give him over,” Trump said
of Snowden in a July 2015 appearance on CNN. In 2013, speaking on Fox &
Friends, he was even tougher. “I think Snowden is a terrible threat. I think
he’s a terrible traitor, and you know what we used to do in the good old days
when we were a strong country?” Trump asked. “You know what we used to do to
traitors, right?” One of the hosts interjected, “Well, you killed them,
Donald.” Trump agreed.

This
is Obama’s legacy on surveillance: a shadow state of brick and mortar, hardware
and software, satellites and eavesdroppers, that is ready to grow on the next
president’s command. How big is too big, though, is a question the outgoing
president has never answered fully. At what point does gathering data become an
end in itself, rather than a means to an end? Is the U.S. government already
there or approaching it?

Unless
answers come, 50 years from now, the world may look back at Obama’s
architecture of surveillance — full of radomes, windowless walls, phone taps,
and double-ringed fences — with the same puzzled astonishment that 1950s bomb
shelters elicit today.

Correction,
Sept. 12, 2016: The Delta IV Heavy is the most powerful American rocket in use
today. A previous version of this article misstated that it was the most
powerful rocket in the country’s history.

"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
Eugene Victor Debs